After decades of cover-ups, union protection rackets, and official indifference, the U.S. Department of Education is finally admitting that government schools are infested with sexual predators preying on captive children.
In some of the strongest official comments to date, U.S. Secretary Linda McMahon vowed a nationwide crackdown on teachers, staff, and other adults in positions of authority who sexually abuse and harass students.
Speaking Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” McMahon made clear that the horrors documented by The Newman Report and others for years cannot continue. “This epidemic of nationwide sexual abuse in our schools must end,” she said.
That is the right language. The question is whether Washington, after building and funding the very machinery that produced this horror, is capable of doing anything more than issuing press releases.
McMahon cited the Department of Education’s own 2004 literature review — the so-called Shakeshaft Report — finding that about one in ten students in grades 8 through 11 reported sexual misconduct by an educator.
“This stat will probably blow your mind. It did mine,” she told host Dana Bash. “Statistics show 1 in 10 children before they finish high school will have been sexually molested in school.”
As the Newman Report explained just last year, those numbers are way out of date and drastically understate the enormity of the problem. In fact, the numbers have gotten much worse over the last two decades.
In her 2024 book Organizational Betrayal: How Schools Enable Sexual Misconduct and How to Stop It, published by Harvard, Shakeshaft estimated that about 17 percent of students — some eight million children — face some form of sexual abuse and misconduct at the hands of teachers and other faculty.
As she documents clearly, teachers, administrators, and even other children see the red flags. And yet, the institutions have looked the other way for decades as countless millions of children have faced horrific crimes at the hands of government-school employees.
Secretary McMahon pledged that those days are over. Her department, she said, will “fully enforce federal law and employ every resource at its disposal to protect children from sexual predators.”
Offering specifics, she said government schools that allow or tolerate sexual misconduct “risk the termination of applicable federal assistance.” In most states, federal funding amounts to about 10 percent of the government “education” budget.
Parents should not be shocked. They should be furious that it took this long for anyone in authority to do something.
The Newman Report Sounded the Alarm Years Ago
Long before McMahon’s Sunday interview, The Newman Report warned that sexual misconduct by government-school faculty was not a collection of isolated “bad apples,” but a systemic plague.
In 2004, researcher Charol Shakeshaft — the leading scholar of “educator sexual misconduct” — synthesized the available studies for the Education Department and found roughly one in ten students victimized by school staff. That already implied tens of millions of American children over the last several decades.
And yet, 20 years later, the problem has become far worse, as Shakeshaft documents in her 2024 book. Attorney John Manly, who represented victims of USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and hundreds of school-abuse cases, says there is now an “epidemic of sexual abuse” in government schools.
In public education in most states, he noted, “it’s next to impossible to fire a bad teacher.” Districts pay abusers to go away. Records vanish. Mandatory reporting statutes are ignored.
“When institutions or people investigate themselves, my experience is they rarely find themselves guilty,” Manly said in an interview on the “Straight to the Point” podcast for the Los Angeles Times.
That is why “pass the trash” is so common. Unions exist to protect members, not students. Administrators, as Manly put it, often view children as “funding devices.” As long as the bodies stay in the seats and the federal dollars keep arriving, the incentive is to conceal, reassign, and move on.
One Los Angeles teacher he cited sexually abused more than 100 children before being caught — and the district destroyed the records. Unfortunately, similar horrors are happening nationwide.
Even in conservative Texas, The Newman Report exposed how government schools have operated what whistleblowers call a “get-out-of-jail-free” system for teachers accused of rape and sexual abuse.
While it may sound hard to imagine, state law allows reporting to a certification board instead of police. Critics labeled it a “Weinstein, Epstein, Diddy” arrangement: pass the trash, protect the union member, keep the funding flowing.
Over 90 percent of those accused of raping children were deemed eligible to return to the classroom. Dallas ISD alone has had well over 100 accused child rapists on the books. The Newman Report exposed that scandal in 2025. The political class yawned.
Now California has provided the latest exhibit. ProPublica and KQED found that from 2019 through 2025, the state’s Commission on Teacher Credentialing failed to revoke licenses for at least 67 educators after districts determined they had committed sexual misconduct against students.
At least 14 were hired by other districts. At least 12 were still working in education as of May.
In fact, the Los Angeles Unified School District had a deal with the union requiring teachers credibly accused of sexually abusing students to be merely reassigned rather than removed. McMahon’s department opened a Title IX investigation into the practice.
Clearly, this is not mere incompetence. It is a culture.
A Symptom, Not the Disease
The epidemic of sexual misconduct among educators is not primarily a “training” problem or a “reporting protocol” problem. It is a symptom of a system built on ideas openly hostile to the Bible, to God, and to any transcendent moral truth.
Government schools spent generations expelling the fear of the Lord, denying that children are made in the image of God, and catechizing them in sexual confusion and gender ideology. The fruit seen today is hardly surprising.
Government schools have been sexualizing, perverting, and confusing children for years — not only through the predators in the faculty lounge, but through official curriculum, library shelves, and policies. The system that did this cannot be trusted to protect children.
Of course, the U.S. Department of Education is unconstitutional. Nothing in Article I enumerates a federal power to run, fund, or police the nation’s classrooms. It should be abolished, and education returned to parents, churches, and the states.
But as long as the department exists and continues to shovel billions into government schools, it might as well point its enforcement machinery at actual horrors instead of pronouns and “equity” audits.
Threatening to cut federal assistance from districts that recycle predators is the least the federal government can do after decades of underwriting the system. Title IX and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act are being invoked here in a cause that, perhaps for the first time, is not a pretext for left-wing social policy.
Talk, however, is cheap. Prosecutions for every perpetrator — and every official who knowingly concealed the crime — must be swift and serious. Reassignment is not justice. A quiet resignation with a glowing letter of recommendation is not justice.
Child rape and sexual abuse of minors are among the most horrific of crimes. They belong in criminal court, with prison sentences that match the damage done to souls and bodies. Administrators who “investigate themselves” and then shred the file should face the same system.
Parents, Stop Waiting for Pharaoh to Rescue the Children
Here is the hard truth McMahon’s announcement cannot paper over: relying on the very government responsible for these institutions to “protect” one’s children is ridiculous. It was the political class that created compulsory government schooling, empowered the unions, ignored the Shakeshaft data for twenty years, and spent the last decade sexualizing childhood. Now they want credit for discovering that teachers systematically molested students and concealed it.
Parents are the first and last line of defense. God did not assign the raising of children to a Cabinet secretary, a school board, or a teachers’ union.
An estimated 8 million victims of sexual misconduct and abuse at school is an indictment of a civilization that outsourced its sons and daughters to a godless bureaucracy and then acted surprised when the bureaucracy consumed them.
McMahon is right that parents should never have to wonder whether their child’s school employs and protects sexual predators. But in truth, they should never have handed the children over to such schools in the first place.
Federal crackdowns, if they are real, should be welcomed as far as they go. They will not go far enough. The system itself is the scandal. Get the children out.
Article posted with permission from Alex Newman
